Empowerment is so accepted in business circles these days that everyone agrees on what it means — giving individuals the freedom and authority – the power – to do their jobs the best way they know how. Who would have thought that something so common-sensical would have caught on in the business world?
One reason it might have stuck to the flip charts of management theory is that it’s not a full-blown way of life in and of itself, the way quality and teamwork are. Instead, empowerment has weaseled its way into the soft center of these two business religions so that you can’t have either one without empowerment.
But, like a worm that sticks it head out of a freshly-bored hole, empowerment does run into some problems when the bright light of implementation strikes it. Critical questions that must be answered to make empowerment effective are sidestepped — questions like who makes which decisions and how high up does the meat axe hit when something goes wrong?
Naturally, being confused and ill-informed has only increased everyone’s enthusiasm for empowerment. No matter where you go in an organization, everyone agrees that they could do a better job if they were cut loose from bureaucratic controls and upper level meddling.
[Note to consultants: Is this the mother lode or what? You have a simple theory that everyone wants and no one knows how to implement. Just work out a deal with three or four other consulting firms and you’ll be set for life. Each of you can take turns rotating through corporate America with your own implementation process that “builds on” what the previous consulting firm has done. Since no-one really knows what fully implemented empowerment is supposed to look like, just tell your clients it looks like the results your process gets. If all of you coordinate this thing correctly, you’ll each have perpetual annuity!!]
You stay-in-one-place managers have a problem, however: the idea of giving somebody under you the leeway to mess up a project you’re ultimately responsible for is a prospect that lacks, shall we say, a certain cachet. Or, to put it more accurately, it has a strong cachet, of the agricultural variety.
Now some managers don’t let this risk bother them, once they realize that giving people the authority to do something doesn’t mean they can’t be punished for doing it wrong. In other words, they can have their empowerment cake and eat it too! They can give employees authority and responsibility, which will give them high marks from the higher-ups for being forward-thinking. Then, when their employees do something wrong, they can nail them, thereby adding enormous pleasure to an otherwise thankless set of tasks.
On the lower levels of the organizational world, it hasn’t taken workers long to realize that empowerment is just another way of painting a bullseye on their own backs. This realization has dampened enthusiasm for this process remarkably.
The biggest dampening realization for both front-line employees and their managers is that empowerment doesn’t come with an on-off switch. If the truth be known, no one wants to be empowered to make hard decisions, they just want to have the authority to decide things that are fairly obvious and easy. They want to be able to be empowered — or not — as they choose.
What’s the answer, what should be done? Well, I can’t tell you in this limited space, but I do happen to own a consulting firm, which I’m sure can help you implement your empowerment program for a modest fee.